Automate a dynamic duplication

[SpaceDandy]

Hey there,

First of all I wanna thank anyone who answers, I often come to community for some of my issues and it's always very helpful !

So, I want to be able to duplicate in a "dynamic way".

I've got a tab "Projects" which is linked to a group of "activities" within another tab. A chosen project has several activities, which are created for each distinct activity day.

Activities of the same project share many infos (partner, location, vehicule used ...) but they always differ in terms of date (start date & end date (ie : 12/7/24 2pm & 12/7/24 6pm)

Sometimes we have to create 10+ activities for a project, and using the duplicate record function seems suboptimal because we can only do it one by one.

So I'd like to know if using automation, extension..., it is possible to create all activities of a project in one click, if you create an activity template and input all the start & end date (where ? idk)

Thank you for your time, have a nice day !

[Mike_AutomaticN]

Hey @SpaceDandy!

Yes. You can def have an Activities Template table. 
Furthermore, you can build an automation that when triggered it will find all Activities for the selected project, from the Activities Template table, and by using repeating group it will create as many activities as needed. 

For dinamically setting dates, I would suggest to come up with a Logic which will predefine dates counting data as from Today() - whenever the automation is triggered. You will probably want to do this vía Script. Also you can have template dates on your Activities Template table. That will help as “example” for the logic. 

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, does highlighting, copying, and then pasting not work for this?

Could also check out record templates for this too, but you'd still need to copy paste the dates unless it's for the same day you're creating the record template: https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-record-templates-in-airtable

[SpaceDandy]

Hey Mike,

Thanks for the help. I'm not sure I get all of it though. To you I'd have 3 distinct tabs ? Projects, Activities, Activities template ?

I mean I don't get where I'd put the info of how many activities I need for this specific project. Should it be a column in "projects" which triggers an automation ?

[SpaceDandy]

Thank you for your time 🙂

Yes absolutely, that was my first recommendation. But my clients want something less "tedious", so I'm looking for alternatives. Right now I think the best is to use calendar in interfaces, and they duplicate one activity and they drag & drop it on another day.

Also record templates would mean doing a template for each different project so it'd take much more time imo.

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, yeah fair enough, if you've got a lot of project types you'd need to transfer all of the linked activities to the appropriate record template.  If you've got relative date calculations it might still be the simplest option, but I'm not too sure what your data looks like so can't say for sure

If I were you I reckon I'd have a 'Project templates' and 'Activity templates' tables, where all the template data resides.  Then in the main 'Projects' table, there'd be a linked field to 'Project templates' for clients to select the appropriate project as well as date fields

From there an automation triggers that'll grab all the 'Activity templates' linked to the selected Project template, and it'd use a repeating group to create all of the records in the 'Activities' table, using the data from the date fields as needed